Page:Plays in Prose and Verse (1922).djvu/12

vi and a popular audience—no other audience at the time caring a straw about us—is full of what I thought to be good round speeches. It makes one of a series of plays upon events in the life of Cuchulain, and if placed in the order of those events the plays would run: 1. "The Hawk’s Well" (Four Plays for Dancers); 2. "The Green Helmet"; 3. "On Baile’s Strand"; 4. "The Only Jealousy of Emer" (Four Plays for Dancers): but they were so little planned for performance upon one evening that they should be at their best on three different kinds of stage.

"The Player Queen" is the only work of mine, not mere personal expression, written during these last twenty years, which is not avowedly Irish in its subject matter being all transacted in some No-Man's-Land. I wrote it, my head full of fantastic architecture invented by myself upon a miniature stage, which corresponds to that of the Abbey in the proportion of one inch to a foot, with a miniature set of Gordon Craig screens and a candle; and if it is gayer than my wont it is that I tried to find words and events that would seem well placed under a beam of